July 23, 1995 | SUZANNE GORDON, Suzanne Gordon, who has covered trends in hospital care, is writing a book about nursing

For a decade, California, the national laboratory for the health insurance experiment called managed care, has pioneered radical reductions in length of stay for hospitalized patients. But news that California-style lengths of stay are moving east has provoked a major rebellion against insurers' freedom to dictate patients' medical fates.

They hate negative advertising and opinion polls gone wild. Most of them aren't sure who they want to be president. But to the loyal Republicans gathered in Vic Goulet's TV room, one thing was pretty clear Thursday night. There was one defining moment in the televised debate between the eight men jockeying to take on Bill Clinton in the 1996 race for the White House. It belonged to Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. And it wasn't good.

Twenty years ago, the film "All the Presidents Men" projected a sexy image of journalists uncovering scandal for the common good. At the pinnacle of their popularity, they were perceived as democracy's champions, members of a fourth branch of government able to uphold the ideals that America's three other branches seemed too sagging to support. Since then, journalists have only stepped up their adversarial gait, looking more fervently than ever for corruption and impropriety.

Fobbit A Novel David Abrams Black Cat: 372 pp., $15 paper In "Going After Cacciato," Tim O'Brien's brilliantly inventive 1978 novel, the title character seeks to escape the madness of 20th-century warfare by simply walking away from the rice paddies of Vietnam and heading for Paris, some 6,800 miles away. Whether real or imagined, the point of the surreal exercise is to get out of the line of fire - the farther away, the better. The soldiers deployed to Iraq in "Fobbit," a first novel by David Abrams, a former Army public affairs specialist who served there in 2005, are far less adventurous in their approach to staying alive, especially if they work in the type of administrative, support, logistics or supply job that does not require them to be in close contact with an enemy all too eager to obliterate them.

Not every movie produced by the Hollywood studios during the Golden Age was tied up in neat little bows; it wasn't all boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. "Films were more edgy and involved characters that were less than perfect," says UCLA film professor Jonathan Kuntz. "Certainly in the 1930s with the Great Depression, there was a lot of disillusionment with the establishment and society. World War II shook everything up and all kinds of crazy things happen."

There are more than 25 diseases that are transmitted sexually. Many have serious and costly consequences. Some of the most common and serious STDs include: Chlamydia * Used to Be Called: Non-gonoccocal urethritis. * Cause: Bacteria. * Number Affected: About 4 million new cases each year in the United States. * Infection Rate: Highest among 15- to 19-year-olds, followed by 20- to 24-year-olds. * At Risk: Everyone, but female teens are more likely to be infected because of immature cervix.

Pungent steam rises from a boiling pot of a mugwort tea blended with wormwood and a variety of other herbs. Above it sits a nude woman on an open-seated stool, partaking in a centuries-old Korean remedy that is gaining a toehold in the West. Vaginal steam baths, called chai-yok, are said to reduce stress, fight infections, clear hemorrhoids, regulate menstrual cycles and aid infertility, among many other health benefits. In Korea, many women steam regularly after their monthly periods.

Medications banned or highly restricted in the United States because of severe, and sometimes fatal, side effects are being smuggled in from Mexico and peddled out of back-room shops across Southern California. These potentially dangerous drugs, which multinational pharmaceutical companies market in Mexico, where regulations and enforcement are less stringent, have shown up consistently in more than 70 raids over the last year of markets, dress shops and swap meets catering to Latino immigrants.